Best way to pay a users paypal account? - paypal

I know the title isn't amazingly descriptive, sorry.
Basically I'm in the midst of creating a website where users can search for and buy website layouts, wordpress/joomla themes etc. Now users will be able to credit their account from paypal and use this 'site credit' to buy themes etc. Now this can be done with IPN, but for people selling themes, what's the best way to allow them to withdraw their earnings to their paypal account. Example;
Joe Bloggs credit ($20 goes in to the website paypal account)
Joe Bloggs buys a theme from John Smith for $10 (a. Joe Bloggs accounts balance = original balance - 10, b. John Smiths account balance = original balance + 10)
John Smith wants to withdraw the $10 he just earnt
Any help appreciated, hope I'm being clear enough, also if anyone could recommend what type of paypal account to use with this as obviously with this sort of traffic going through it I need as little to no limits as possible.

You are going to need a Paypal Business account to avoid any limitations on transactions.
As for paying people via paypal, I'm assuming you are going to pay the people out of the website account. If so, then you can use the PayPal Mass Pay API, which lets you pay one or more users out of the account you are using to call the API. See https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/US/en_US/files/developer/PP_NVPAPI_DeveloperGuide.pdf, and the section on the Mass Pay API for details. There is also a SOAP interface equivalent, but the basics are:
Provide the ID or email of the receiving account
Provide the amount to pay them.
I'm not going to go into the NVP or paypal API authentication system, since you mention you've already sorted them paying you, but basically the same system applies.
If you want people to be able to 'withdraw', simply tell them at registration to specify a 'payment email address', and then when they want to withdraw, just have a form, the result of which runs the call to the API, and pays them.
Edit: Have just checked, and the Mass Pay API requires the Website Payments Pro, which costs $30 per month, and has a transaction fee of: 2.2% – 2.9% + $0.30 USD (these only apply to incoming transactions) - see https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/general/PaymentSolutions-outside for info. Don't know what the cost limitations of your project are.

There seems to be an assumption that the funds must go through your account. Have you looked into acting as more of a storefront, where your site directs buyers to a PayPal page where they will pay the seller directly?

I'm working on a project that needs to do something similar, I modified the PayPal's sample code:
How to send money to paypal using php
I hope it be useful.

Related

Best way to split a payment using the Smart Payments Button

I am setting up the Paypal integration for a Clients website. He has a page where users can buy stuff that others users sell and he wants the buyers to pay using Paypal, he also wants the payment to be charged a fee, so that a percentage of the payment goes to the website owner and the remainder goes to the seller. For example:
Tom sells shirts at $20 each and i want to buy two, so i would pay $40 plus the 3% of the transaction, that would sum up to $41.2, $40 would go to Tom and $1.2 to the page owner.
How can i do this using Paypal? I have been reading a lot Smart Payments Button describes how to set a payment but the funds go to a single person, i need to set a chained payment, split payment or something alike and their docs seem very fuzzy.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks!
platform_fees , documented here , is the analogue to chained payments. However, it is only available to PayPal partners -- i.e., probably not your client.
For separate transaction payments to more than one receiver account, there is multi-seller payments.
After completing the Paypal Integration and after tears and pain i can tell that i couldn't use platform_fees.
The implementation is complete and working but i wrote to customer support and to dev support and they just don't want you to use platform_fees so nothing will work along that path.
The solution they provide and the one they want you to use is getting all the money on your account and then splitting it using Payouts to all the clients.
Really bad solution imo but its convenient for them because they charge more transactions instead of allowing you to do everything on a single transaction.

Integrate Paypal in multi merchant website

I have a multi merchant website and in that what i need to do is when customer purchase a product 5% of the money is gone to website paypal account for service and rest of the money will be gone to seller paypal account. I need to integrate paypal in that. As paypal adaptive payments is deprecated and paypal is not providing any other solution to do that.
Can anyone please tell me any paypal service which can make it possible.
Thanks in advance.
Sounds like you need marketplace APIs. If you need PayPal APIs in specific, you can look into PayPal for Marketplaces. Braintree (A PayPal service) has better APIs here.
Stripe Connect is also a competitor with good reputation.
With all these APIs, you can control funds disbursement by specifying percentages as you mentioned in your post. I don't know what your complete use case is. So I'd suggest researching all 3 of these and choosing the one that best fits your budget and business model.
Create a mathematical equation to give you the difference between
the total and your 5% (or the seller's 95%).
Process the entire amount into your account.
Pay the seller their (95%) share by transferring that amount to their account.

Setting up paypal so my client gets a percentage from every transaction on her site

I have a client that wants a site that hosts sellers selling items and allows buyers to purchase the items. She wants all the money transactions to be between the buyer and seller and she collects a percentage of the sale. She wants her percentage to be automatically put in her paypal account. Kinda like eBay for example.
I have used paypal standard with buttons but have never done anything like this. Does anyone have any suggestions about how I would get started and/or how this is done?
Thank you for your suggestions,
Greg
Many people would (and probably will) recommend using some sort of split/chained payment solution, but I will just point out that the site you mention, eBay, does not use split payments. eBay sellers register with eBay; eBay faciliates the sales and bills the sellers for their fees. You can do the billing through invoicing, or via preapproved payment/billing agreements (which allow you to collect from sellers without them having to send you each payment).
While this solution requires you to do a little more work (tracking sales & billing) it is a lot more flexible.

Account Aggregators/API's - which provide credit card bill due-dates and allow for cross-party payments?

I understand there are a number of account aggregators out there which allow businesses to get access to customers's transaction data (Plaid, Yodlee, Intuit Customer Account API, open to others...). I'd like to know which ones DO or DON'T also allow for:
Determining the DUE-DATE of a customer's credit card balance.
Making PAYMENTS across accounts and parties.
Response from Yodlee
1) Determining the DUE-DATE of a customer's credit card balance
Yes , Yodlee do provide credit card bill due-date though their API.
2) Making PAYMENTS across accounts and parties.
Yodlee does have a Bill-Pay product but it's not available to API customers as of today.
I've been working with a loan repayment API and ran into this issue as well with Plaid. For US banks only, it seems that there are three items you need for this system:
The bill due date (and amount) for the credit card
The banking information. At a minimum, a user's routing and account number (which Plaid can provide) and the credit card's banking information (their routing and account number for direct payments).
An ACH processor or US bank that will let you upload a NACHA file. This is the step that actually moves the money from one account to the other. Expect lots of compliance paperwork from the partner that you use.
It's a complicated world when you try to pay on behalf of a user. Outside of programming, get a good lawyer who knows bank law!
Response from Plaid (as of 9/22/2014): No/Not yet and No
"1) Within a customer's credit information, does Plaid provide their credit card bill due-date? what would be the appropriate call for that?
Currently no, but it's something we may add in the future.
2) Does Plaid offer anything by way of making payments or money transfers across accounts? (I'm assuming 'no,' but just want to confirm)
We do not, however we can help with the authorization of accounts for ACH & Wire transfers. Feel free to reach out directly for more information."

Chargify vs Amazon's, Google's and PayPal's payment service?

I wanna build a web store for selling people's second hand products.
A customer adds the products into a shopping cart.
He/she pays (credit card, bank account) for it and I get the money.
The seller sends the bought products to the customer.
I get send the money to the seller (and have taken a fee for it).
People tend to mention Amazon's, Google's and PayPal's payment service but recently I came across services like Chargify and Recurly.
My questions:
How do these two differ from the other three?
Which one would support the above mentioned transaction process?
How should I set up the above transaction process?
The "big 3" require an account. How do I charge with just a credit card or bank account only?
Thanks!
Thanks for thinking of Chargify.
We're not the right thing for your need... we focus on helping a business manage many things involved in recurring billing of customers.
For what you want to do, I think one of the "Big 3" is the way to go. You've got the extra "wrinkle" of this, however: you're essentially collecting money on behalf of each Seller, and each Seller may be selling very different things and will have different levels of honesty, etc.
All of my experience is with merchants that have a traditional merchant account and payment gateway, which together allow them to charge credit cards. But the banks that issue merchant accounts want to know what each merchant (each Seller) is about. I'm 99% sure the banks dislike a single merchant account being used to sell / collect credit card payments for more than one merchant.
Anyway, to the degree that it's useful, I wrote a blog post last year about merchant accounts and payment gateways. It may be helpful to you as you explore options:
https://lancewalley.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/merchant-accounts-payment-gateways/
See my answer in Online payments for a middleman.
PayPal Adaptive Payments allows you to accept guest payments, without requiring buyers to have a PayPal account.
Another thing to think about is regional availability; Amazon / Google may sound interesting, but are not very useful if you don't live in the US or UK. Whereas PayPal Adaptive Payments is available pretty much globally (with the exception of a few countries where PayPal hasn't launched yet).